New Fire TV music app can access entire Prime Music library

Something I overlooked when writing my overview of the new Amazon Music app for the Fire TV and Fire TV Stick, which is actually fairly significant, is that the new app can play any song in Amazon’s Prime Music catalogue without needing to add the song to your library first. The prior music interface on the Fire TV only accessed songs that were in your music library, but that’s no longer the case if you’re a Prime subscriber. This change is likely in preparation for the upcoming premium music subscription service from Amazon.

The BROWSE screen in the new music app, which is the default screen, is primarily for discovering music that isn’t already in your music library. If you’re an Amazon Prime member, all the music on this screen is music you can play for free. The screen consists of recommended, popular, and new music broken down into lists of albums, songs, and playlists. I initially thought the music shown spanned across Amazon’s entire music store, but that isn’t the case. It is just the music you already have access to through Prime, and I suspect in the future, if you’re a subscriber of Amazon’s upcoming premium music service, it will include that music as well.

The SEARCH screen of the new music app functions in the same manner. You are not searching Amazon’s entire music store, but instead only searching through music that you can play immediately at no additional cost. If you’re not a Prime member, I assume that it will only show music you’ve purchased through Amazon. As a Prime member myself, my search results include music both from Prime and from my purchased content.

It’s worth noting that the word “Prime” does not appear anywhere in the app. it’s evident that the purpose of the app is to access your Amazon music library, regardless of whether you purchased the music, have access to it through Prime, or access through a future unreleased subscription service.

10 comments

I wish Amazon would just roll that 250,000 songs (upload your own songs) for $24.95/year of Cloud Music storage, into a Prime subscription as a benefit. Heck? I would settle for a lesser upload amount, but that aspect of Amazon Music needs to change desperately. 250 song uploads for free isn’t enough and 250,000 song uploads is for $24.95 a year is too much.

Also the Prime Music aspect of a subscription should be made sharable with another adult account, just like Prime Movies is…

For me the new Fire TV music is a huge drawback from the previous Fire-integrated music menu. Playlists cannot be sorted anymore. If you have a lot of playlists this is certainly annoying. To shuffle play a playlist I used to press one button. Now I have to go through the menus and press buttons a total of five times. And the most annoying thing: voice search is not possible. I talked to Amazon customer support about this issue and they confirmed that this feature was planned to be integrated into the app but eventually was dropped from their to-do list for some unknown reason.